Tag: research questions

My new project seems an excellent time to walk through a way to think about a large long-term research project (it’s always nice to have a handy example!)

Step one: What am I trying to do here?

I described a lot of this in my previous post, but I want to turn out articles that take on the core theories behind what a given plant was used for, and provide more information about them, in a way that allows people to figure out where the information comes from.

(As I said, there’s nothing wrong with intuitive response – but it helps a lot to know what’s underlying it. A lot of our intuition is built on our experiences and the connections we’ve made between our experiences, so knowing what’s influencing that is pretty helpful.)

It’s also really helpful to know where a particular idea comes from if you need to make an adjustment. For example, if you need to substitute a herb you’d use for a spell (you can’t get it, or you’re allergic to it, or some other reason), wouldn’t you rather have a detailed idea of what people think about the alternatives? Too often, people put a whole lot of things together, while forgetting that ‘herb that does passionate lust’ is possibly a different flavour (magically speaking, and possibly also physically) from one that is known for helping build a long-lasting committed relationship.

Why do I want to know about the source?

I don’t believe that older sources are better. A quick look at medical history suggests why learning things is so powerful and important! But I do think knowing where our ideas and information comes from is very helpful, in figuring out what it means to us.

I want to look at the sources to figure out where they came from, and to begin to understand the other associations. One common one from the Middle Ages is the question of why certain figures (Mary is a common one here) are so commonly shown in certain colours.

In Mary’s case, it’s a particular shade of blue. She’s painted in that shade, because it was an incredibly rare and expensive colour to make at the time. So the same way you might put gold leaf on the most important pieces of art, you painted that shade of blue to demonstrate how something in the picture was important or central or most honoured.

In this day of other options for colours, maybe that reason for choosing blue is less relevant than the fact that we know psychologically it is calming, or that it echoes water, or some other reason. (Probably, given colour symbology, multiple different reasons.)

Step two: What do I need?

I need some sources. My idea, to start with, is to pick a number of well-known plants and culinary herbs, things that are widely used and pretty widely documented. (There are whole books devoted to roses, for example!)

And then check out those items in a selection of well-known sources.

This means I need to collect those sources, which will fall roughly into three groups:

Early sources

By which I mean mostly Classical sources – Greeks, Romans, and maybe some Medieval and Renaissance texts. These are things that largely predate our understanding of modern medicinal uses. (In other words, some of their medicinal uses worked, but they might have the wrong idea about why. In other cases, the suggested things and their uses are just bizzare. Want more about this? Listen to just about any episode of the podcast Sawbones…)

Early modern sources

In the 17th to 19th centuries, you start getting a more systematic review of medicinal uses – but of course, you see less discussion of magical uses. However, many of the herbals of this time included folklore and stories. A great example here is Nicholas Culpepper, whose Complete Herbal is a classic in the field. This exists as an ebook on Project Gutenberg, which has the advantage of being searchable.

Modern sources

There are of course dozens, hundreds, of modern resources out there about these topics, from a variety of different perspectives (medicinal herbalism, magical herbalism, religious and magical sources, folklore collections, and many many more.) Making sense of them is baffling.

Obviously, I’m not going to read every modern source – my time, my library, my available ability to hold things in my head won’t allow it. But I can look at a few of the most widely referenced ones, and look at what they talk about, and try and track down stories. For example, Scott Cunningham’s Complete Book of Magical Herbs doesn’t have citations, but I can use it to help me look at stories to trace backwards. I won’t be able to figure out sources for all of them, but I can do some.

Step three: Make a plan

Identify some widely referenced sources, and see what a handful say about each plant, and then follow stories from there. For example, Culpepper, talking about saffron, says: “It is an herb of the Sun, and under the Lion, and therefore you need not demand a reason why it strengthens the heart so exceedingly.” From there, one can follow some notes about where it comes from, how one recognises a plant suitable for use, and so on.

I full expect that sometimes later research will turn up new information or new sources to explore. But one of the things I want to do with this project is model how a long-term project can go, how there often is a spiralling pattern to the work, where you come back to things over time as you’ve learned more or have a new way to connect them.

Mixed with the plants and stones, I also want to highlight useful books, or at least books that are relevant to the project, putting them into context of why they were writtten, what kinds of information they’re interesting and useful for. High on my list is Victoria Finlay’s Color: A Natural History of the Palette which is a fabulous look at stories and information about colour.

Challenges of research

Wrapping up this post, I want to talk about a few challenges of research.

The biggest one, I suspect, is going to be variations in names. In books written before we had species names for plants, they can get referred to in a wide range of ways. Sometimes the names are consistent through the centuries, but often they’re not. I’ll have to do some digging and hunting to figure out what the references might be in many cases.

The other big challenge I’ve discussed above: so many sources, so little time. The only way to do this is to do things in a manageable chunk, and remind myself (and everyone reading) that I can and will come back.

You get a bonus post this week! Here’s a post that I made for a writer’s community I belong to that I can now share. It’s in a slightly different style than my blog posts here (because it was designed for that community.) Several of the examples used came from people’s questions when they requested this kind of help.

(I have redacted two examples that are more identifying of the specifics of my day job than I do in public, but the rest of it is as posted for the community in February 2018.)

Introduction

Hi! Welcome to a (not that brief) guide to researching complicated details.

I’m Jenett. I’m a librarian by profession, and I work somewhere where I get asked weirdly specific questions a lot. I also really love geeking about the process of finding random bits of information and making sense of them.

I’m drawing some experiences I’ve had below, but also a couple of examples from the original comment suggesting this topic. Those asked about in-depth research about the effects of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in the US Military, or details of things like whether a minor in Ohio can go to a psychiatrist without parental permission.

0) What do you actually need, and when?

Not everything is online or readily available (lots of stuff isn’t) so at some point, you may have to make a decision between ‘can find this with reasonable searching’ and coming up with something that may not be ideal but will work.

Because of this, it’s worth pausing with a complicated question to figure out how much time you want to spend on it. How important is it to what you’re writing?

Is it something you can write around (by referencing people doing the appropriate thing, without details, or by cutting the scene at that point and picking up in the aftermath of the thing happening?)

Getting something actively wrong is more likely to throw readers out of your story than either glossing over it, or picking something that is pretty likely but not actually provable.

Some topics are notorious for getting letters from readers if you get the details wrong, and others aren’t. If only a small number of your possible readers would know the amazingly specific thing, then maybe you can fudge more easily than something like horses, which a lot of people know a little about (and definitely have opinions about.)

1) Read widely

Not just books, though books are good too – but read a range of other material, so that you start to have a sense of what kinds of resources are out there. The goal isn’t to retain all the details, but to get a sense of where you can find them if you need them.

Soak in your topic:

Find a few blogs, or Twitter accounts or whatever your social media of choice is that are relevant to your current project (especially the places you might have questions.) Read them. Follow links sometimes. Don’t take notes, but do have a system for bookmarking particularly useful items you may want later.

The thing you really want to do when you know you’re exploring a topic is get a sense of the terms that are used about it. Don’t trust Wikipedia as the final word, but it’s great for giving you a sense of commonly used terms or phrases, and for putting things in some sort of historical, geographical, or intellectual context.

Beyond that, though, I really recommend adding a couple of general purpose things. Longform highlights a couple of longform journalism articles every day on a huge range of topics. Not only are they often very interesting, but I learn a lot of terminology, approaches, and ways people look at the world from them.

The former highlights links from around the web, with discussion, and the latter is a personal advice subsite. The kinds of questions people have – or specific detail about things like neighbourhoods or things to visit – can be really amazingly helpful. Even if they don’t have the specific information, they can help you learn about terms for searches you need to do.

2) All knowledge is contained in the Internet.

Not actually – we’ll get to that – but a lot, in the sense of ‘people who can point you to the information you want’.

Building up a diverse set of people you know online who know about stuff you don’t will pay off again and again and again. Online communities for people with shared interests can be a great place to ask (or shared goals, like writing communities.)

Of course, you want to be respectful of people’s time. That’s why a general “Hey, anyone know about X? Can I pick your brain for a couple of minutes about a specific piece I can’t find information on?” request can be better than asking specific people. Also because unexpected people may have answers. (It’s also good to tell people where you’ve already looked.)

I have a story about this. In my job as a librarian, someone asked me about particular map, which was not labelled in a way that he (or I) could read. I thought that if I could identify what the map was and when it was, I’d be able to figure out the names. (I’m obscuring some details here.)

I posted a photo with a few aspects highlighted to my personal Dreamwidth account, and within 2 hours, three different people had all identified it. Why? Because all of them are big board gamers, and the specific map is one used in the Diplomacy board, of Germany around 1901.

Not the way I’d have gotten that information, but with that, I could figure out what the place names were, and why it was labelled the way it was.

I have this kind of thing happen a couple of times a year on average. I am really good at searching, and using library tools – I do it a lot, after all – but sometimes someone with specific expertise will save me hours or days of work.

So long as you’re not interrupting or being pushy, people also often really love to share their knowledge, passions, and interests. A general post with a “Know anyone who can help with this?” lets people share that in a way that works out well for everyone a lot of the time.

3) Is this a topic there might be substantial resources about?

One of the things that happens for writers is that we want to know a lot of pragmatic details about how things work.

What was it like to put on clothing? How did it feel to move in it? How did cooking work? Or things people did in the household? What was the street outside like? What did medicine look like or taste like or smell like?

Unfortunately, these are often not the sort of details that are in a lot of resource books – you often have to dig pretty hard, and on the more academic side, they may not actually answer the questions you’re really interested in. They might talk about how to make the thing, but have no clue about what it was like to wear it or use it every day.

These days, this is getting better. For a lot of time periods (at least for English-language places) there are actually books called things like “Daily Life in Elizabethan Times” or “Daily Life in Colonial America” or whatever, that will fill in a lot of these gaps for you. Even if you can’t find quite the right time period, you can often get a long way by finding the closest one and then adjusting specific things that changed.

If you’re writing fantasy, this can also work if you can figure out what point in history your world is similar to.

Reenactment groups, experimental archaeology, and other similar resources can also be a huge help – there’s a genre of videos on YouTube, for example, of people getting dressed in clothing from different time periods. The Royal Ballet did a fascinating lecture series on changes in dance over time. Obviously, someone has to have produced the thing you’re interested in, but there are a lot more options around these days than there were 20 years ago.

4) Is this a topic that there will be public info on?

In some cases, the answer may be no.

For example, you usually won’t find a lot of detailed information on enforcement of online terms of service harassment issues (not them happening, but how a given site’s process handles them step by step) because advertising that kind of thing can make it easier for people to walk up right up to the line of what’s actionable and still make people miserable.

The same is often true for harassment, abuse, domestic violence issues, etc.

In other cases, people don’t publicise the information because it might put first responders at risk, or be easily misused in ways that can harm others. (For example, lots of sources on poisons won’t get specific about how much a lethal dose is. Which makes a lot of sense when dealing with people, but complicates things for mystery writers.)

Closed settings also present problems for research. Some details about military policy, practice, or procedure may only be available for people in the military or in some closely associated group. Handbooks about how a school handles something may only be available to parents, staff, and students at that school.

Other items might technically be available, but sufficiently hard to get to it’s like they’re not. This covers things like detailed legal resources (not the laws themselves, but analysis), some kinds of genealogical records, and other things where there are business interests who’d like to make you go through them to get it.

If you’re looking at a topic where this might be a case, one way in is through the next step.

5) Are there people who’ve lived through this experience?

Is it possible there’s a biography, memoir, podcast, blog, or another resource from a person who’s done this thing, is interested in this thing, etc? Sometimes this can be an incredible way to get details – especially for smaller things or emotional reactions.

Looking at our examples that started this, this is where I’d probably start for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. I might look especially for things from advocacy groups or lawyers working to help people affected by it, as well as people who were in the military and affected at the time.

(At the same time, I’d be exploring more formal research and writing through library database resources and focused internet searches too, so that I could get both the ‘official’ side, and the actual experience.)

6) Is this a law?

It can be really hard to track down legal information. While the actual laws are usually public in the United States (and also in other countries with at least a premise of democracy), a lot of the more functional ways to access those laws are through indexes, databases, and other resources that cost money to access and are designed for lawyers, firms, and law libraries, not for random authors. They’re also (unlike many other online resources) harder to get access to through your local public library.

One trick here is to figure out what the law is (the numbers or other identification) and do searches on that. Or, failing that, try tightly focused internet searches.

An example:

For our question about Ohio, minors, and whether they can go to a psychiatrist, I tried the search terms “ohio law minors parents medical appointments” (because I suspected that the relevant laws actually cover a range of medical issues, not just psychiatry.)

For reasons having to do with filter bubbles, your precise results will probably be different than what I saw (that’s a whole different discussion!), but on the first page of my search results, I found <a href=”https://www.akronbar.org/when-can-minors-consent-to-medical-treatment”>this article from the Akron Bar Asociation website</a> which says that minors can consent to outpatient psychiatric treatment on their own behalf at the age of fourteen.

Now, that blog post isn’t dated (though it comes from an organization that’s relevant to the question and likely to be accurate at the time it was written) so I’d want to confirm this information in other sources. But that post gives me the specific laws to go check, and here’s the law, which explains it covers only six visits, no medication, and what should happen when you hit those limits.

7) Is this a city/state/regional thing?

You can ask libraries in many places for help with local/regional questions – even if you’re not from there! Try other options first, since this can both take some time to hear back, and libraries have a large but limited capacity to answer questions, but if you get stumped, a lot of libraries will be glad to help you.

You may be able to get help from your local library, or from a large library in your region. (For example, anyone who lives, works, goes to school, or owns property in Massachusetts can get an ecard for the Boston Public Library.) But even if that’s not the case, you can also often ask libraries in other locations.

Many libraries have an email option or contact form. (It’s usually under ‘Research’ or ‘Research Help’ or as an option or link on their Contact page, but you might have to hunt around a bit.)

Some places require you to have a barcode for their system, but a lot of libraries are glad to get reasonable requests from other places. (And obviously, you want to do your best to ask in the language the library uses, though sometimes you’ll get lucky with other options.)

How do you figure out how to contact a library?

First, start with a large city in the state or area that you’re interested in (the largest one is usually best here – try the capital of the state or province, or if you need something slightly smaller than that, the largest city or town that will do.) Look for a contact form or method, and see if they put any limitations on asking that affect you.

How to ask:

The best way to ask questions, in this case, is to be brief, clear, and tell them what you’ve already tried or what you’re hoping for. It will be useful to the librarian to know that you’re looking for information as an author rather than for a school project or immediate legal need (because they might suggest other resources that could also help you.)

Take a minute to prepare what you’re asking. Your question shouldn’t be too long – two to three paragraphs is plenty. Explain your question in a couple of sentences, why you’re looking for the information, and where you’ve already looked. Here’s an example.

Hi,

I’m an author working on a story set in Cleveland, and I’m trying to find information on what Ohio law says about medical treatment and consent for minors. Can you direct me to a reliable source that explains what the options are?

I’ve tried online searches, but haven’t found anything that quite fits the question I have: I’m looking for the options and laws around someone who is 16 and dealing with mental health issues, specifically seeing a psychiatrist.

Note how this makes it clear in the first sentence why you’re asking a library in Ohio about this, which is helpful.

Getting an answer

Usually, libraries that answer questions in the first place will provide at least a brief answer (though it may take a bit of time for them to get back to you), but there may be costs if you want copies of material or longer research times.

Some libraries offer additional services for a fee if you go over a set amount of time, others just won’t answer questions that take the librarians more than 15 or 20 minutes and will point you at some resources and you take it from there. Some libraries may refer some topics – like detailed business questions or genealogy – to other sources, and libraries generally don’t answer detailed medical or legal questions other than pointing you at resources from reliable sources.)

8) Is there a relevant museum, society, or library?

If there’s a reasonable way to contact them, try asking.

I work for a highly specialised library, and I get questions from authors every couple of months. I’m always glad to answer them because it can help people understand what we do and our particular community better. (Also, they’re often fun questions to dig into.)

Small libraries, museums, and historical societies can be very slow to get back to you, though, especially if they’re mostly staffed by volunteers, or if the paid staff are wearing a dozen hats. The more clearly you can phrase your question, and the more you can do for yourself first, the better.

For example:

“I’ve looked at your website and your annual reports, but I haven’t been able to find something that explains exactly how the fees worked for students in 1890. Can you point me to something?” is a pretty easy question for someone who’s familiar with their materials to answer.

Either they’ll be able to point you at something, answer it quickly from materials they have handy, or they’ll know the information isn’t actually available like that for some reason and can tell you that (and maybe a best guess.)

A “Tell me all about your institution in 1890”, however, is a much harder thing to answer. That could take days to work through, and still not touch on the parts you were interested in.

And sometimes information just isn’t available.

We’ve had two questions about how domestic chores were handled at our institution in the 1840s, and we just don’t know a lot of details, because it’s something that the white professional-class men who were writing the annual reports didn’t write much down about.

We know there were servant-type staff, and we know students had some minimal chores. We know more about the fact that the students had to take cold showers (it was considered good for their health) because the students wrote a letter protesting it.

There might be more in some of our correspondence, but it’s in volume after volume of 19th century handwriting, and even the people who work there haven’t read all of that yet!

On the other hand, if someone asks me about that (as an author has), it’s pretty easy for me to explain what we know, where to find more, and what we don’t, and to point them to some things they can look at in more detail if they decide to.

A few final notes

The kinds of questions I mention here are exactly the kind of thing I’m glad to help with through the research consulting part of what I do here.

(To give you an example of how doing this a lot improves speed, none of the examples here took me more than 5-10 minutes to poke at, though obviously they took a bit longer to write up.)

So, here I was, planning to do another installment in the Personal Libraries series. And then last Friday happened.

To be precise, I got a call from our head of HR, saying she’d gotten an unemployment request from me, and thought I should know about that. Someone had gotten hold of my social security number and name and used it to file a fraudulent claim.

So, for today’s post, here’s a guide to what I did to check that I was doing all the necessary things.

Background is useful

One thing that makes for really excellent research is having something of a background in the topic.

Obviously, we’re not going to be experts in all the things, all the time – no one can do that. But we can help ourselves out by taking in a steady stream of information that makes it easy to get ourselves up to speed on specifics quickly if we have to.

For me, this means reading or skimming a couple of general purpose sources of news and information. I subscribe to online editions of two newspapers and support one of my local NPR stations (and they send a summary of current major stories daily), plus I read several general purpose sites that cover a wide range of topics (Metafilter, in my case), plus a couple of general financial and lifehack sites.

I specifically wasn’t trying to build expert knowledge in what to do if I got hit with identity theft (because the specifics on what to do change periodically, as services and government resources change), but all of this meant I was well aware it happens sometimes, that it’s not always easy to figure out where the breech happened, and that there are in fact steps in what to do about it.

That meant that when I got that call from HR, I didn’t have a tidy list of what to do. But I knew they were out there, that ‘identity theft’ was the term I wanted to work with, and that I’d just need a little time to do those searches and check my information.

Oh, and a bit of background:

If you’re outside the US and trying to figure out what this means: in the United States, the social security number is the closest thing we have to a personal identification number.

It’s technically only supposed to be asked for in a limited number of situations (like taxes, or some kinds of financial accounts) but it’s often asked for in a bunch of other places – everything from college applications to rental applications to medical records.

Habits are also useful

Fortunately, I already have a routine for keeping an eye on financial accounts (more on that in a few steps).

So I knew right where everything was for the different accounts, and could check quickly to see that there were no unexpected charges, and that no one had opened up accounts in my name recently.

First steps

The first step here is to take a deep breath. Panicking isn’t going to make this go better, and it won’t solve the problem (no matter how tempting it is.)

I was at work when I got that call. I did a little quick searching that made it clear that yes, I was going to want to make half a dozen phone calls, and a couple of them probably needed to be during business hours, which helped.

I’d been out sick for two days on Wednesday and Thursday, and had already been considering going home early, so I arranged to do that (because making the calls from home would be a lot easier.) Fortunately, I’d already done the things that I really needed to be in the office to do.

The drive home was fast (no traffic!) but it gave me about fifteen minutes to process through things and sort out what I wanted to do in my head, so it would be easier to take steps in a useful order when I got home.

Initial searches

I started by doing a search on “identity theft social security number” because that was the thing I knew had been compromised – and it’s a slightly different kind of issue than someone who potentially has your credit card info.

I focused on recent pages, written in the last year, since advice changes as people try new scams, and technology has new options. I also looked at my state attorney general’s site for information.

(If you search in Google, you can use the “Tools” option and select “Past year” instead of “Any time” in the option that will pop up below the main search tabs.)

I didn’t take the advice from any one source (even the Social Security folks!) Instead, I looked at about 20 sources and combined them into a list of things to do. (That’s also why I’m not giving you a ton of links here: the best resources will change over time.)

Here comes the spreadsheet

You knew there was going to be one, right, if you’ve been reading this blog.

I set up a spreadsheet with multiple sheets in it.

The first sheet has conversations I’ve had or steps I’ve taken (like online reports). It has columns for date, time, who I talked to, what the general topic was, how (phone, online, etc.), and then notes for the conversation and any follow up I need to do or pay attention to.

The second sheet has links of things I still need to do.

The third sheet has specific contact information for people I may need to get in touch with again, so I don’t have to hunt up the numbers or web addresses.

What did I do?

1) Put a fraud alert on my credit account.

This is a 90-day alert, and if you call one of the three agencies in the United States, they will pass the alert on to the other two. The call was entirely automated and very straightforward for being an automated call.

I got a reference number and asked for my rights to come in the mail, rather than hearing them over the phone, so I’ll have a confirmation of what they are. It’s possible to extend these alerts or put a credit freeze on for longer, but it’s easier to do that once I have a completed police report.

2) Put in a police report with my local police department

This produces a temporary report (the instructions say very clearly not to use the confirmation number until they’ve followed up) but a police report opens up some additional options for later (and if there ever is a problem down the road, being able to demonstrate that I reported it is helpful.)

My police department has an online form that you fill in, or I could have called the non-emergency line. This was the second step because I wanted to be able to say I’d made the report to any later calls.

3) Called the Massachusetts Unemployment Fraud line.

I found them by looking at the Unemployment Office site. Since this is the place where the actual identity theft happened, it was high on the list. I spoke to a really pleasant man who was glad to confirm they’d already flagged it as a problem in their system, and that the address they had wasn’t the one I gave them.

The big issue is that if I ever do need to file for unemployment in Massachusetts, as long as that claim is on file, I’ll need to have additional identification and documentation. (This means that police report is important! But also things like a photocopy of my ID, and current mail to demonstrate my address, etc.)

4) My bank

I bank with a small local independent bank who have the best customer service (Thanks, Leader Bank!)

I got a real person right away, no phone tree, and he was great about checking and making notes in my file that if there are any inquiries about my account, to ask for an agreed on passcode, or call me for verification.

5) Credit cards

I didn’t put a freeze on my credit accounts just yet (it will take a little more paperwork and I want to have the police report to reference before I do).

I did turn on alerts on all of them to let me know if there are more than very minimal charges on any of them. I already check my accounts manually twice a week. (I will be bumping that to three times a week.)

6) Reporting to the FTC

Many of my sources (including the SSA) encouraged me to report it to the FTC’s Identity Theft site. They ask you a series of questions about what happened and advise what steps you should take. You can also get a confirmation number saying you filed a report with them, which helps demonstrate that you took action on the problem.

7) Social Security Administration

I was able to lock access to my account online but will need to do a more elaborate process to sort out some of it. Again, some of that will be much easier with the police report.

Things I need to do in the future

Once I have the police report, then I’ll do additional paperwork for a credit freeze and to clear up documentation with the social security offices.

It’ll be important to keep that documentation somewhere easy to access if I need it (i.e. all in one place) so that if I do need it, I can grab it quickly. I’ve been a little unhappy with my current ‘important papers’ filing for a while, so this is a good time to rework that system into something a bit easier to use.

I live by myself, so one of the things I’m thinking about here is if something happens where friends need to help me with filing for disability or other benefits, what I need to document now to make that easier. My ideal is to be able to identify a folder that has a summary of everything.

Along the way, I also read a bunch of advice – for example, I may get scam calls with threats if I don’t make payments, pretending to be from the IRS, etc. The sites I looked at had advice on ignoring those and explained how the IRS actually contacts you.

I’ll also just need to keep an eye out for weird stuff, in case something else crops up. Some of the things I found suggest people try the unemployment scam first and then move on to other things if it works. On the other hand, this might not be the only person who has my information, depending on how they got it, so it could be an issue for credit, leases, etc.

Welcome to a periodic installment of ‘day in the life’ because I figure it might be interesting to see what this looks like for a librarian. This was not quite a typical day, but it gives a good range of the kinds of things I do.

(I’m not being very specific about the content of some of the things I’m working on, both because of patron privacy and because it’d fairly quickly directly identify where I work: instead, I’m talking about the kinds of questions and projects in more general terms.)

A not quite typical Friday

5:15am :

Get up, do minor morning computer things, put on swimsuit and nicer work clothes on top. Make sure to pack jewelry and a nicer hair thing. (Normally, I am a knit top, knit skirt, and hair in a braid person, but we have international visitors today.)

6:00am :

Leave my apartment, drive to the fitness club where I swim. Swim from 6:25 to 7, shower, change, drive to work.

7:35 am :

Get into the library. Our library and archives assistant is working in the archives this morning (so she can be up in the library this afternoon) so I turn on the lights, unlock the stacks, and pull the cart of materials for our visiting researcher out into my office.

For the next hour, I eat breakfast, work through my email, review some pages on the intranet that we need to tidy up, and read web pages about the people who are visiting this afternoon, so I can have a better sense of their possible questions. Forward one question to other people in our institution who can probably identify the thing being asked about much more quickly.

We’re light on questions today – only the one so far. Some days, I come in to find three or four waiting.

8:45 am:

Quick bathroom break, set up our webcam for monitoring our researcher and wait for her to show up at the front desk.

We have a very small staff (me, our archivist, and a shared assistant) and visiting researchers work at a desk in my office. It’s common for archives to have limits on how materials are handled (that’s another post!), and for people using materials to be observed the entire time.

Our IT folks helped us figure out a webcam option (pointed at the work table researchers use, but we can’t see things on their screen or notes, just that they’re not mishandling materials), which means I can take a quick break (bathroom, to help someone else, etc.) with a little advance warning now.

However, there are some other limitations: there’s some kinds of work I have a much harder time doing or focusing on, and I can’t do things involving extended phone calls or going back and forth to the stacks. And I can’t have music on, and there are definitely some tasks I find easier or more pleasant with music or a podcast.

This researcher has been here for two days already, so we don’t need to cover any of the basics like how things work.

9:00 am:

Waiting for researcher to appear. Get a reply to the ‘track down this particular thing’ with a list of other people to ask, send the question off to them. Answer another email re: the library newsletter. Open most recent newsletter so I can set up this month’s version (it goes out the last week of the month.)

My researcher days involve a certain amount of ‘can’t start more complex task because I am waiting for them to show up/come back from lunch, and don’t want to get into the middle of something’

9:35 : Go to plug in my phone for music, researcher arrives. Get her settled.

9:50 am:

Get a call from our front desk: there is a walk-in visitor who’d like to visit the library. Get assistant to Skype in from downstairs to keep an eye on researcher.

It turns out to be a book jobber who buys books from various sources including library discards and resells on Amazon/eBay (she is here with a friend doing something at our institution.) We discard very few books, but I give her a chance to look at our free shelf.

10:15 am:

Get back to my desk to actually do things. Take a while to settle down again. Answer an email about shifting one of our general email addresses over to Gmail (we are at the tail end of shifting from Outlook to Gmail: I am delighted by the switch, but will be glad when everything’s in one system.)

Get an answer back about the thing this morning, remove stuff not to be shared with person who asked (a “The person who developed this is very elderly, you might be able to reach her at this email” which is the kind of thing we don’t pass on to researchers unless actually necessary.)

11:15 am:

Work on newsletter. Pause to make an accessible version of a handout I want to include in the newsletter.

The newsletter is a simple Word doc that goes up in our staff intranet. There’s a section about something the Research Library offers (this month, I’m talking about getting research articles), an Archives thing (usually a recently digitised collection) and then information about the month’s book display and a list (with some brief annotations) of new titles in the library.

12:00 pm:

Have lunch with colleagues and researcher (outside on a picnic bench: we are making the most of the last of the decent weather.)

12:30 pm:

Back at my desk, doing a few small things before my 1:00 meeting.

1:00 pm:

Meeting and tour of campus with two people (the CEO and an architect) from overseas who are doing a tour of schools and organisations like ours around the world to see best practices for specific kinds of design. They were fantastic.

(Also fantastic: the foundation that gave them a multi-million dollar grant on the condition they did such a tour. Very smart. They were learning a lot from seeing how different places did things and what was working for them best.)

3:30 pm:

Dash back from the tour just in time to let my assistant go for the weekend (since she’d been the staff member in charge of our researcher.) Grab a bottle of fizzy water because that was a lot of walking. Catch up on email that came in while I was gone, try to finish the newsletter except for pulling the new books.

3:55 pm:

Discuss interesting reference puzzle with archivist. Put interesting puzzle on to-do list for Monday, because the amount I will get done before leaving is approximately 3 minutes and a lot of frustration. See researcher back out to the main door, do a few tiny things.

(As a note, the research on Monday involved about 90 minutes of diving into the actual process by which people made sculptures in the 1840s. Who knew?! We’ve got useful answers now, though.)

4:15 pm:

Head home, via my local pharmacy for a flu shot. Get back home around 5:30 (due to the flu shot: I normally get home around 5.) Make dinner, fall over, do brainless things for the rest of the evening.

Today’s resource

I’m a big fan of the Search/Research blog, by Dan Russell for improving my search skills. (He works at Google, but this is a side project).

He posts challenges with a question (and people reply in the comments with thoughts) and then a week or so later, he posts the results, so you can see how he did something and learn a bit along the way.

He just tackled a favourite topic of mine, a long-extinct plant that, as he says was “something so valuable that it was depicted on ancient coins as an emblem of wealth.”

I knew immediately what he was talking about (this is a thing that happens to me a lot: I am a magpie of random bits of knowledge) which is one way to figure out an answer but I loved seeing how people sorted out searching for this.

Additional observations

He mentions that “Roman extinct plant” doesn’t pull up the list of People Also Ask for him, but it did for me when I tried it just now. Nice example of either how the filter bubble affects things, or the effect of people searching on this topic as a result of his posts. Hard to tell which!

Unreliable narrators:

I also really love Dan calling out that historical sources aren’t always reliable. Especially about medicine. Or science. Or, come to that, a number of other topics.

Pliny the Elder is a great example: he did a lot of writing about things that are useful because they survived when other historical medical and natural history writing didn’t. But he’s not the most reliable source for actual useful information.

If you want to know more about Pliny, the podcast Sawbones did an episode all about Pliny in 2016. He keeps coming up in their discussions of medical history, again, because a lot of his material survived when other people’s didn’t. They provide tons of reasons his medical advice is not something you should be following.

PS

The image for this post has one lonely fennel bulb, which is in the same family as Silphium. I thought that rather appropriate.